Around here it seems Spring has sprung. Buds are now opening on the crabapples and on the Lil’ Miss Kims, and we’ve got some hostas poking up taking a good look at the surroundings, and most of the migrating ducks have moved on (except the mergansers, that have too much fun chasing one another to move on), and… yes … there’s baseball in the air but not on the field.

Debra Birx does it right:

As I learned about her remarkable life and career, I thought: this woman might have been a great contestant on the old CBS television program called “What’s My Line” where four panelists asked questions to guess at the occupation of a guest.

Birx, in response to a question, opened a window on her personal life, divulging that she and her husband live in a multi-generational household with her parents, who are 91 and 96, plus her daughter and son-in-law and their children, revealing how the grandmother part comes in, bringing to mind the sitcom “Full House” and other family-oriented TV shows familiar to those in their bonus years.

I thought to myself, this remarkable woman — a physician, an ambassador and a senior military officer who also holds two U.S. Meritorious Service medals plus the Legion of Merit Award for her research, leadership and management during her tenure at the Department of Defense – has a life experience rooted in a story, an American story, that is familiar to and will be admired by most Americans of any generation.

How do I know? We’ve watched it on TV, and our nation’s leaders have given that story in the person of Birx our nation’s highest awards. How fortunate can we be?

We are fortunate because a physician and a soldier who is also a grandmother can also understand the fears and concerns, real or imagined, of ordinary people. That can only be good.

What women get right:

et’s hear it for the female of the species and (more guardedly) for her second X-chromosome! Female superiority in colour vision, immune response, longevity, even basic survival from birth to death are illustrated in Sharon Moalem’s The Better Half. After decades, if not centuries, of bad press for women and their vulnerable biology, this book argues that in fact “almost everything that is biologically difficult to do in life … is done better by females”.

Moalem, a Canadian-born physician, is a research geneticist who has identified two new rare genetic conditions. He has worked across the world in paediatric medicine, including clinics for HIV-infected infants and is also a biotechnology entrepreneur and bestselling author. The Better Half is his latest foray into the field of popular science, and presents a general argument for the superiority of women’s biology to men’s.

In most circumstances, a human female has two X-chromosomes, one from her father and one from her mother; a male has just one, inherited from his mother, which is paired with a Y-chromosome, inherited from his father. Moalem believes that the X-chromosome has always received a poor press, and that it is time this negative view is counteracted. He draws on swathes of medical and historical data to show that, in many instances, the superiority of women’s biology is explicitly linked to their possession of the second X-chromosome. The greater complexity of women’s biology, he claims, is the secret of their success – it is more difficult to make a female but, once made, she trumps the male in her lifelong survival skills, for instance in her hyperefficient immune system shrugging off infection and maximising the benefits of vaccination – which means that females can avoid the consequences of a wide range of life threatening events ranging from starvation and cancer to, Moalem has cautiously concluded, Covid-19.

In mainstream genetics it was long held that, despite having two X-chromosomes, female cells only made use of one: the second randomly switched off or deactivated early on in embryonic development, a process rather summarily described as an instance of “genetic redundancy”. There was some evidence that the deactivation reduced female chances of succumbing to X-linked problems, due to the availability of an undamaged back-up. It was acknowledged, for example (though rather grudgingly), that women generally escaped being colour blind. Moalem notes that when he was studying genetics there was much emphasis on the tiny Y-chromosome as “what makes a man”. He observes wryly that maybe this positivity was related to the fact that “most of the people who were speaking breathlessly about the Y had one as well”.

What California did right for COVID-19:

(CNN)Within weeks of the Grand Princess cruise ship arriving off the California coast -- an early harbinger of the coming coronavirus pandemic -- Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the first statewide mandatory restrictions in the United States.

He ordered California's nearly 40 million residents to stay home to help combat the outbreak, but he didn't stop there.

While many states scramble for desperately needed equipment and supplies, Newsom this week announced a deal for millions of masks for health care workers, and though the state is still battling the outbreak, it finds itself in a position to donate hundreds of ventilators to hospitals across the country.

California and New York -- the nation's hardest hit state -- had about the same number of coronavirus cases in the first week of March, according to Covid Tracking Project.

By Wednesday morning, California had more than 17,000 cases compared to nearly eight times that in New York, or more than 140,000 cases. The Golden State has 452 deaths to New York's more than 5,000.

"When we write this history and look at the tens of thousands of lives in California that will have been spared, I think there will be lots of factors that went into it," said Dr. Robert Wachter, professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco.

"The most important was that leaders of all types -- whether they were in government or in businesses -- took it seriously, believed that this was a real risk and did the right thing early."

Here is what California did right in response to the contagion: (see link above)

What Myron Rolle did right:

Few people are ever able to realistically ask themselves, "Should I become a professional football player or a brain surgeon?" much less actually succeed at doing both. But that's exactly what Myron Rolle managed to do.

The native Texan, whose parents immigrated here from the Bahamas, completed his Bachelor's degree at Florida State in less than three years. After college, he spent a year studying at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, then returned to play as a defensive back in the NFL for the Tennessee Titans for three years. After announcing that he was leaving football in 2013, he entered medical school. He is now in his third year of residency as a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

So, you know, a pretty average life.

Now, Rolle has found himself on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the neurosurgery floor of his hospital has been transformed into a COVID-19-only unit. Though he's still performing emergency brain surgeries, all elective procedures have been postponed. With his schedule freed up, Rolle has volunteered to work in the surge clinic that triages new patients who come in with COVID-19 symptoms.

What Stephanie Lepone and Ginna Rauls did right:

(CNN)A group of volunteers has been working to repair 27,000 desperately needed N95 protective masks for a Memphis, Tennessee, hospital battling the coronavirus pandemic -- and they got most of them done in a weekend.

Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis recently found dozens of cases of the masks in storage but couldn't use them because the elastic straps had dry-rotted and needed to be replaced.

It was a huge job that organizers Stephanie Lepone and Ginna Rauls stumbled into almost by accident. The women are longtime friends and have regular sewing get togethers, Lepone told CNN.

Lepone said she works full time as an engineer and has three kids, but she wanted to do something to help while she's quarantined at home.

They had started making cloth masks for a pediatrician's office and Lepone asked a friend, who's a director at Baptist Memorial Health Care, to see whether they needed cloth masks.